Application of IANA Charset Registration for GBK
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(last updated 2002-05-23)
Charset name:
GBK
Charset aliases:
CP936, MS936, windows-936
Suitability for use in MIME text:
Yes
Published specification(s):
The GBK (Guobiao Kuozhan) specification was created by the
Chinese IT Standardization Technical Committee in December 1995:
Chinese Internal Code Specification
( Hanzi Neima Kuozhan Guifan)
["Specifications defining the extensions of internal codes for
Chinese ideograms."]
ISO 10646 equivalency table:
Code Page 936 (CP936) is the most popular implementation of GBK.
A mapping to Unicode is provided by Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/936.txt
Mapping data in CharMapML (XML) format is also available:
http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/charset/data/xml/windows-936-2000.xml
Additional information:
The People's Republic of China has already expressed her
fundamental consent to support the combined efforts of the ISO/IEC
and the Unicode Consortium through publishing a Chinese National
Standard that was code- and character- compatible with ISO 10646-1 /
Unicode 2.1. This standard was named GB 13000.1-93.
Since the legacy GB 2312-1980 standard was still widely used, it
was important to provide a smooth migration path towards
GB 13000.1-93. GBK (1995) was the first step in this direction.
It defines a two-byte encoding scheme which extends GB2312 to
include the entire character repertoire of the base CJK Unihan area
(U+4E00 to U+9FA5) and other additions.
The most popular implementation of GBK is Code Page 936 (CP936)
on Microsoft Windows system. Therefore, some existing software
also recognize the names CP936, MS936 and windows-936.
As the GBK code space is limited, it cannot support the full code
space of ISO 10646. To remedy this shortcoming, the GBK
specification has since been "replaced" by the mandatory
GB 18030-2000 standard (GB18030).
Person & email address to contact for further information:
CHEN Zhuang
chenzh&cesi.ac.cn
Chinese IT Standardization Technical Committee
Chinese Electronics Standardization Institute
Intended usage:
COMMON (Still commonly used)
OBSOLETE (Superceded by GB18030)
Compiled by Anthony Fok , March 15, 2002.
(created 2002-05-23)